Category: Politics and Government

H1B Misuse

There aren’t a whole lot of Trump’s policies with which I have any agreement. The H1B program, however, is one that most certainly gets abused at the expense of American workers. Working in IT fields, I have seen a lot of questionable sponsorships. Questionable … well, if you don’t know the whole story (how long the company has been trying to hire a qualified citizen, or the entire scope of ‘qualified’), you may have a feeling that Americans are being overlooked in favor of cheaper foreign labor. But it’s just a feeling.

I have, however, seen outright fraud within the system. Well meaning fraud, but fraud just the same. The most egregious example was more than a decade ago. There was a Russian woman who worked on one of the internal help desks. Not quite the entry level “follow the online flow chart & read it to the caller” kind of help desks for which IT Support may be known … but a help desk just the same. She and half a dozen other people staffed the line. Because her visa sponsorship indicated that she had a unique skill set that the company could not staff with an American worker … well, someone questioned how such a uniquely skilled worker would have half a dozen American coworkers doing the exact same thing.

Now she was a very nice woman and I really hoped she got to stay in the country in spite of the visa irregularity being investigated … like she got reclassified into some other visa for people who just wanted to live here. Instead, the company created a new title and position for her. A higher profile position with more authority that paid more money … but, honestly, she still wasn’t doing anything I couldn’t have found dozens of other people in the area to do. It was data mining. Data mining that she had to learn how to perform once she took the position … and if the criterion was “someone who was capable of learning to generate reports from PC inventory data” the list of local, available, citizens who were perfectly qualified for the job. People who were OUT of work at the time and would have loved that made up job.

I never reported this visa fraud. It’s one thing to object to theoretical abuse of the system; it is quite another thing to get a person who you like deported. And there-in is the problem with reforming the H1B system … what do you do with the people who are already here under false pretenses? Like the Mexican restaurant owner who got deported a few weeks ago … that’s academically the right answer. But it ignores the human impact to the academic solution. Is it really the Right Thing to tear someone away from their community, from relationships they’ve had for a decade, from their home because they have violated the law?

But is it right to essentially reward them? To allow someone who had a fraudulent H1B first dibs on regular work visas at the expense of people who followed the proper process to get into the visa queue? To increase the regular work visa cap for the year to allow improper H1Bs to be converted? If I had a good answer, I’d have gotten myself hired on by DoJ or ICE. But there’s no way to both avoid personal grief while not rewarding the individual for not following the law.

I’m hoping Trump’s new initiative orders more stringent review of the claims being made on visa sponsorship forms. Maybe even something like the Patent office where individuals somewhat knowledgeable about the field determine the veracity of the claim. Leaving the current visa holders alone – at least until their visa comes up for renewal – is about the best compromise I could conceive.

Negative Tax Rate

I’ve just about got our taxes completed for the year – we expect a huge refund because we have a tax credit that is 30% of the geothermal installation cost (the credit that made our geothermal system cost almost exactly as much as a far less efficient air exchange heat pump). What I didn’t expect was to receive a federal tax refund that exceeds our federal tax payments.

But the child tax credit is refundable – so we have a carry over for next year from the geothermal system and get a thousand bucks for having a kid. At which point, it occurred to me what Trump may be hiding in his tax returns. Not that he pays 0$ in federal taxes (yeah, I paid a whole heap of money to the state, medicare, social security, sales tax, and property tax too … doesn’t change the fact the federal government is literally giving me more money that I paid them this year) but that he finagles his adjusted income to be sufficiently low to qualify for refundable tax credits.

People get outraged when wealthy people pay a lower tax rate than the poor. Even more so when wealthy people literally pay less in taxes. But to have the federal government giving a fairly affluent individual a couple of grand extra … that would be shockingly egregious.

Personally … I didn’t try to get the money beyond including the energy efficiency tax credit in my pricing of geothermal and solar systems. I put all of my info into a tax preparation application and got an answer back. It took me a day to realize that that answer actually exceeded my payments (and that the changes I was trying to model for additional HSA contributions didn’t seem to change our refund any because our refund was maxed out and what was changing was the carry forward on form 5695. I’m also not turning it down. We have paid tens of thousands of dollars in federal taxes each year for decades – I’ll consider it getting an extra grand back from last year.

Military Decision Making and The GBU-43

Some time ago, Trump announced that he would be giving more latitude to field commanders in military operations – when and what to target. At the end of last week, a Green Beret was killed in Nangarhar Province … and now a few days later we’ve dropped the largest bomb we’ve got in the same province. When asked if the president had authorized the strike, Spicer deferred to the military agencies. Trump just muttered some nonsense about how we all know what happened. If he’d authorized the strike, he would have been crowing about it.

 

History of South East Asia

Alternative Fact: “I felt pretty strongly that they (China) had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.” (Donald Trump in the Wall Street Journal)

Real Fact: No, it is exactly what I thought. I had a dual major in University: history and theoretical physics. So, yeah, I may have more knowledge of South East Asian history than the average American. I’ve specifically studied the history of the region as it relates to the war in Vietnam. I don’t believe Korea had quite the animosity toward China that fomented over hundreds of years in Việt Nam — a country whose name means Southern Bách Việt (an area of Southern China) … but that’s not saying much. There’s economic dependency, but coupling economic dependency with pre-existing resentment is not a recipe for harmonious relations.

My concern is not that a firm grasp of international history is not the norm world-wide (that sucks too, but probably been the way of things since language was developed). My concern is not that Trump has changed is opinion as new facts come to light — shocked, but quite heartened that the man eventually figured out that China was propping up its currency for a couple of years now. What concerns me is that the leader of China has to convey this history lesson to the US President. Because the dude refuses to let anyone else clue him into reality. None of his campaign advisers (both the currency manipulation & they can sort North Korea claims were made prior to him becoming president), none of the guys from State, no military adviser (including those who report directly to Trump) could bring real facts into this administration. In *this* instance, the leader of another country managed to hold Trump’s attention long enough to convey his version of reality (dangerous since our president is now operating under a view that doesn’t skew our country’s way … do we support Chinese expansion into the South China Sea now? I’m sure the Chinese president has a decent rational for that move as well).

But what happens when a situation arrives where the other country’s highest ranking individuals are not on hand to brief the US president??

Internet Privacy (Or Lack Thereof)

Well, the House passed Senate Joint Resolution 34 — which essentially tells the FCC that it cannot have the policy it enacted last year that prohibits ISPs from selling an account’s browsing history. What exactly does that mean? Well, they won’t literally sell your browsing history — anyone bored enough to peruse mine … I’d happily sell my browser history for the right price. But that’s not what is going to happen. For one thing, they’re asking for lawsuits — you visit a specific drug’s web site, or a few cancer treatment centres and your usage is indicative of specific medical conditions. An insurance company or employer buys your history and uses it to fire you or increase rates, and your ISP has created actual damages.

What will likely happen is the ISPs become more effective sellers of online advertising. They offer a slightly different service than current advertising brokers. The current brokers use cookies embedded on customer’s sites to track your browsing activity. If you clear your cookies, some of their tracking history is lost as well. If you use multiple computers (or even multiple browsers on one computer), they do not have a complete picture of your browsing because cookies are not shared between browsers or computers. If you browse in private mode (or block cookies, or use a third-party product to reduce personalized advertising), these advertisers may not be able to glean much about you at all. The ISP does not have any of these problems — no matter what computer or browser I use at home, the ISP will see the traffic. Since their traffic history is maintained on their side … nothing I can do to clear the history. Browse in private mode or block cookies and you’re still making a request that transits the ISP’s network.

The ISPs have disadvantages, though, as well. When you are using encrypted protocols (HTTPS, SSH, etc) … the ISP can see the destination IP and a bunch of encrypted gibberish. Now *something* about you can be determined by the destination IP (hit 151.101.129.164 a lot and I know you read the NYTimes online). Analysis of the encrypted content can be used to guess the content — that’s a bit of research that I don’t believe is currently being used for advertising, but there are researchers who catalog patterns of bitrate negotiation on YouTube videos and use it as a fingerprint to guess what video is being watched using only the encrypted traffic. Apart from some guessing, though, the ISP does not know exactly what is being done over encrypted communication channels (even the URL being requested – so while they may know I read the NYTimes, they don’t know if I read the political headlines, recipes, or concert listings out on LI). Cookie-based advertisers can, however, track traffic to encrypted (HTTPS) web sites. This is because site operators embed the cookie in their site … so where an ISP cannot read the data you transmit with an HTTPS site, the server in question *can* (otherwise it wouldn’t know what site you requested).

So while an ISP won’t sell someone a database of the URLs you’ve accessed last week, they will use that information to form advertising buckets and sell a specific number of ads being served to “people who browse yarn stores” or “people who read Hollywood gossip” or “right-leaning political activists”. Because they have limitations as well, ISP ad brokerages are unlikely to replace the cookie based individualized advertising. I suspect current advertising customers will spread their advertising dollars out between the two — get someone who can target you based on browsing over HTTPS and someone who can target you even if you block cookies.

What about using VPN or TOR to anonymize your traffic? Well, that helps — in either case, your ISP no longer can determine the specific web sites you view. *But* they can still categorize you as a technically saavy and security conscious individual and throw you into the “tech stuff” and “computer security stuff” advertising buckets.

You can opt out of the cookie-based individualized advertising — Network Advertising Initiative or Digital Advertising Alliance — an industry move that I assume was meant to quell customer anger and avoid government regulations (i.e. enough people get angry enough and are not provided some type of redress, they’ll lobby their state/federal government to DO SOMETHING about it). The ISPs will likely create a similar set of policies and a process to opt-out. Which means the being passed to the president for signature essentially changed the ISP’s ability to use my individual browsing history from an opt-in (maybe as a condition of a lower price rate) to an opt-out (where I have to know to do it, go through the trouble of finding how to do it, and possibly even keep renewing my opt-out). Not as bad as a lot of reporting sounds, but also not a terribly constituant-friendly move.

A couple of links to the current targeted marketing opt-outs for companies which whom I do business so bothered to waste a few hours trying to determine how to opt-out:

https://pc2.mypreferences.com/Charter/TargetedDigitalMarketingAds

https://www.t-mobile.com/company/privacy-resources/your-privacy-choices/ad-options.html

 

Government as a Business

We’re getting another attempt to remodel the government as a business. If I had to run the federal government like a business, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to run it like one of Trump’s businesses! But lets ignore whose business.

The problem with the swat team Trump’s announced is that it seems to presuppose that the problem with government is a top-level management issue that could be sorted by sound business practices. What corporation has their top level leadership appointed by its customers? Or even its owners – sure, corporate boards are voted by shareholders … but not the C-level positions. Additionally, what business would almost guarantee multi-year positions to their high level leadership team? Regardless of performance?!

There is something to be said for bringing private sector innovation into government operations — especially at a lower level. Match up individual functions of government agencies with private sector businesses or even non-profits that have similar functionalities. Several government agencies have large logistical operations (FEMA, military) that a logistics company could help. Maybe Habitat for Humanity has ideas that would farther HUD’s goals. University teams may have interesting input too. And marketing — corporate experience would certainly be beneficial in selling legislation and initiatives.

But the fundamental problem I have with the principal that government should run like a business is that few businesses are monopolies. If you don’t like how a business operates, what values they support, the product they create … you shop around and select another one.

There was a whole thing a year or two ago with a baker who didn’t want to make a cake for a homosexual couple’s wedding. But as a customer, I can chose not to contract with a bigoted pastry chef for my events either. It is possible enough people don’t care and she remains in business. Or her choices mean her business goes under. Either way, you are not forced to support her beliefs because there are other bakeries.

Government provides services that cannot be privatized – for reasons of efficiency, non-profitability, or sensibility (privatizing the military security and prisons are a good counter-example of why government should provide these services). As such, I cannot just pick another military if I think the federal one is engaged in too many offensive operations. I cannot select a new environmental protection agency if I think the federal one fails to actually protect the environment.

If we’re going to operate the government like a monopoly (see: industries generally subject to a LOT of regulation), we are not just the customers! The government is a customer owned co-op. One that operates in hundreds of different verticals.

 

 

Learning the Hard Way (Or Not Learning at All)

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly called out the Obama administration and US military for announcing their plans to target an area. Tipping off the enemy, he said. No reason for it, he said. All manner of politicians, military strategists, and people who bothered to think about it for a few minutes explained the rational — there are a LOT of civilians in the area we will be targeting. We would rather not incur civilian casualties as part of our military campaigns — if for no other reason, it’s bad PR. Either the advanced warning drives them out of the area or they are still there to be hit. Driving them out of the area still disrupts their operations.

So now Trump is in charge – I am sure we’ve stopped advertising where military strikes will occur. And non-combatant civilian deaths have skyrocketed. Something like 1,000 reported in March — I’m sure there’s inflation involved in this reporting. The old Soviet instantaneous statistic modification was half anything good, double anything bad, which would still be 500 civilians killed in a month that is not yet over. Gee, if only there was some way we could let these civilians know ahead of time.

The Story Within The Story

There have been a lot of instances in the past few months where a story about Trump contains a throw-away line that seems more important than the story being conveyed. Not reading EOs in a NYTimes piece not long after the inauguration, for instance.

Today’s reporting on Paul Manafort seems to be following this trend. The guy had a multi-million dollar contract with Oleg Deripaska … who is, in turn, a friend/ally of Putin. There’s a lot of focus on the money involved, the farther involvement of Trump associates with Russians, and the speeches and policy changes that were made pre-convention last year. But the scope of the work seems to be overlooked. He provided strategies on how to advance Russian interests around the world and undermine Putin’s political rivals. Which sounds a lot like advancing Russia’s interests by undermining rivals … or hacking the DNC and releasing information that negatively reflects on Clinton. And releasing more when she still looked to be leading in the weeks prior to the election.

The campaign chair potentially came up with the strategy that may or may not have involved collusion from Trump’s team. Even if they’re a bunch of stooges … the fact that the chap who consulted on the policy in the first place then took a high-level position with the campaign looks REALLY bad.